He was fascinated to learn how humans and animals have inborn capacities for learning, and how our positive and negative life experiences shape our perceptions and behaviors. Stages of human development explain limitations and vulnerabilities along our paths of maturation. He was particularly interested in systematic therapeutic interventions that could change our reactions to our worlds and to recover from emotional and behavioral dysfunctions.

Psychology been enormously helpful in a therapeutic tool kit. He includes behavior modification procedures, such as positive and negative reinforcements for learning, and systematic desensitization for traumas. While similar in several ways to Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT), TWR is much quicker and easier to use.

Having his MD training gave him a thorough understanding of the physical body, from its chemical and cellular composition, through its anatomy and physiology, and its functions in health and illness. He was able to help people with medical problems to deal with their challenges. He also understand the contributions medications can offer, though his preference is to teach self-healing methods that minimize the need for drugs.

He helped particularly with pains of all sorts because he understood how the body and brain participate in physical and psychological pains. While he was taught in medical school that pain is treated with pain killers, he found this is often a poor choice. Self-healing methods enable us to identify and clear the roots of our problems so that pains are very often eliminated and pain killers are not needed.

He took a year off after his second medical school year to study psychiatric research. He wanted to contribute to a greater understanding of health and healing. Most importantly, Dan learned how to set up and run clinical trials of various treatments.

He had an insatiable curiosity to learn about this wonderful world we live in. As a child, he thought that grownups knew everything and that one day he would be a grownup and he would know everything. He never gave up on this search for knowledge and understanding of life, the universe and everything!

At: University of Cincinnati Department of Psychiatry, Cincinnati General Hospital, Ohio; Colorado Psychiatric Hospital, Denver, Colorado; Denver General Hospital, Colorado)

He was fortunate to train when psychiatry was all about psychotherapy and not focused, as it is today, solely on prescription of medications. He learned psychoanalytic therapy (which he found very helpful in self-understanding but not in promoting change), psychodynamic (relationship) therapy, child and adolescent psychiatry, psychosomatic medicine and community psychiatric services.

His understandings of how the mind and the body interact in health and illness has been vastly enhanced through these years of training.

He came to appreciate that each person is a piece of a family – in addition to being an individual. We carry within ourselves rules for how we relate to the world, plus cognitive and emotional residues from our experiences with our family.

In many cases, the problems individuals speak as much for the unresolved issues of other members of their families as they speak of the individuals’ psychological problems. Helping the whole family deal with their collective problems is often much more productive than working with just one piece of the family.